Transcription
Climate change is already a heavy topic, and it's getting heavier because we're understanding that we need to do more than we are right. We're understanding, in fact, that those of us who live in the developed world need to be really pushing towards eliminating our emissions. That's to put it mildly, not what's on the table now, and it tends to feel a little overwhelming when we look at what is there in reality today and the magnitude of the problem that we face.
When we have overwhelming problems in front of us, we tend to seek simple answers. We look at where the emissions are coming from—they're coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks and so forth—and we say, "OK, well, the problem is that they're there; they're coming out of fossil fuels that we're burning; so therefore, the answer must be to replace those fossil fuels with clean sources of energy." And while, of course, we do need clean energy, I would put to you that it's possible that by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem, we're in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it.
The reason why is that we live on a planet that is rapidly urbanizing. By mid-century, we're going to have about 8 billion, perhaps more, people living in cities or within a day's travel of one. We will be an overwhelmingly urban species. In order to provide the kind of energy that it would take for 8 billion people living in cities that are even somewhat like the cities that those of us in the global north live in today, we would have to generate an absolutely astonishing amount of energy. It may be possible that we are not even able to build that much clean energy.
So, if we're seriously talking about tackling climate change on an urbanizing planet, we need to look somewhere else for the solution. The solution, in fact, may be closer to home than we think, because all of those cities we're building are opportunities.